For decades, society has been seeing more and more identity politics: claiming an identity as a member of an oppressed or marginalized group.
Legal scholar Kathryn Woodward argues in an article entitled Mapping The Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color that within a minority group there often exist intersecting minorities.
Woodward identifies the problem with identity politics as being “not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite: that it frequently conflates or ignores intra-group differences.”
Woodward also argues that when it comes to violence against women, identity politics are especially challenging because the violence many women experience can be shaped by other parts of their identities, such as race and class.
Woodward undertook a case study on women’s shelters in the minority communities of Los Angeles and argues that shelters need to address not only the violence against women, but also the multi-layers of oppression and domination that occur as a result of race, class, and gender.
She believes that when race, gender, and class come together, intervention strategies used for women who don’t share the same backgrounds or situations will be of limited use to women who face obstacles of race or class.